CRAIG CONLEY (Prof. Oddfellow) is recognized by Encarta as “America’s most creative and diligent scholar of letters, words and punctuation.” He has been called a “language fanatic” by Page Six gossip columnist Cindy Adams, a “cult hero” by Publisher’s Weekly, a “monk for the modern age” by George Parker, and “a true Renaissance man of the modern era, diving headfirst into comprehensive, open-minded study of realms obscured or merely obscure” by Clint Marsh. An eccentric scholar, Conley’s ideas are often decades ahead of their time. He invented the concept of the “virtual pet” in 1980, fifteen years before the debut of the popular “Tamagotchi” in Japan. His virtual pet, actually a rare flower, still thrives and has reached an incomprehensible size. Conley’s website is OneLetterWords.com.
While it's true that "flowers [are] able to tell time," instead of saying, for example, "It's 4:45," they'll say, "It's a quarter till." And you'll be like, "Till what?" And they'll be like, "till the ground and muse along the odoriferous furrows of our lowlands." And you'll be like, "I don't know the allusion because I've never read J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer," and they'll have some comeback or other; they always do. The headline is from Popular Mechanics, 1930.